All Posts Tagged With: "inflation"
The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
If you were to believe spokesmen for the Obama regime and its allied pseudo-economists, there is no tradeoff between the size of government and our standard of living. On the contrary, they would like people to believe that the bigger the government gets, the more it can “stimulate” the economy and solve all sorts of [...]
18Nov2009 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedBiography of the Dollar: How the Mighty Buck Conquered the World and Why It’s Under Siege
Think of the various dollar-denominated bills in your pocket. They surely represent value, but with the dollar backed by nothing beyond trust in the United States and its Treasury, the greenback’s success as a worldwide store of value is something of a marvel.
Wall Street Journal reporter Craig Karmin’s Biography of the Dollar helps us to [...]
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
Reading The Return of Depression Economics, I have to admit I was surprised. Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics and New York Times columnist, isn’t as feisty and partisan in the book as he is in his column. Moreover, he presents some useful information about the many economic collapses that have occurred in [...]
18Nov2009 | William L. Anderson | 0 comments | ContinuedRutherford B. Hayes and the Financing of American Prosperity
Rutherford B. Hayes, America’s nineteenth president (1877–1881), is generally dismissed as a minor, even below-average president. Matthew Josephson, the journalist-chronicler of the late 1800s, insisted that Hayes had “no capacity for . . . large-minded leadership.” Other historians have written him off as just another cipher among a string of forgettable chief executives of the [...]
23Oct2009 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 1 comment | ContinuedOld, Bold Futility
In economic analysis and policy formulation, profundity is not to be confused with complexity. And simple logic is not the same as simplicity. Reliance in thought and communication on shortcut slogans and mottos yields not solution but fiasco.
With employment slumping, many would have us believe in a simplistic “bold economic recovery program.” With vast public-works [...]
How Much Money Does an Economy Need?
In How Much Money Does an Economy Need? Hunter Lewis addresses some of the most fundamental questions of monetary policy in a question-and-answer format. For a subject often clouded by technicalities, the language is refreshingly plain. Sometimes too plain, perhaps, to satisfy an academic economist. But academic economists aren’t the intended audience. The book can [...]
15Oct2009 | Lawrence H. White | 1 comment | ContinuedIn the Grip of Madness
“Thank God we had the federal government last week to bail out the private sector!” That is what a rather statist friend of mine declared a year ago as the economy tanked, almost gleeful that the financial crisis seemed to be proving how much we all need a massive federal establishment to both regulate and [...]
19Aug2009 | Lawrence W. Reed | 24 comments | ContinuedThe Fatal Conceit
The politicians are confident that they can wisely spend trillions of your dollars. The arrogance of the political class is stunning.
17Jun2009 | John Stossel | 9 comments | ContinuedKeynes’s Ghost
The multiplier argument is founded on two key assumptions that turn out to be false. First is the notion that savings are not spent but rather are withdrawn from the expenditure stream. The multiplier’s second incorrect premise is that government expenditures are “autonomous”; that is, government spending does not depend on current income.
9Jun2009 | James C. W. Ahiakpor | 3 comments | ContinuedCapital Letters
Is Greenspan Really Innocent of Causing the Housing Boom?
David Henderson and Jeff Hummel have written a remarkably pro-Greenspan article, “Was Money Really Easy Under Greenspan?” (www.tinyurl.com/cuf3ug). The authors overlooked several points that would undermine their portrayal of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan as an anti-inflationist and the best Fed chairman ever. (Better than Paul Volcker?) To [...]
Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond
Veteran financial writer James Grant describes himself as a “Grover Cleveland Democrat”—that is, someone who believes strongly in sound money, free trade, and very limited government. Mr. Market Miscalculates is a collection of his essays published in “Grant’s Interest Rate Observer” over the last decade. While most financial writers credulously accept the notion that central [...]
24Apr2009 | George C. Leef | Comments Off | ContinuedRecycling Discredited Ideas
The current financial crisis has fueled a frenzied recycling of discredited Keynesian ideas. We are hearing again of the need for “public works,” of the need to “stimulate” the economy. The Federal Reserve is frantically inflating the supply of money. We are laying the groundwork for a disaster reminiscent of the 1970s—if not worse.
1Apr2009 | Peter Lewin | 5 comments | ContinuedA Microeconomist’s Protest
The conventional macroeconomic diagnosis and proposed cures ignore many important structural or microeconomic factors.
1Apr2009 | Mario Rizzo | 8 comments | ContinuedGovernment Sets Us Up for the Next Bust
If an athlete injures himself and suffers great pain, we recognize the shortsightedness of giving him painkillers to keep him going. The pain might be masked, but at the risk of greater injury later.
That’s a good analogy for the inflationary policies now pursued by Washington. These policies may temporarily “stimulate the economy,” but they also [...]
Was Money Really Easy Under Greenspan?
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has become everyone’s favorite scapegoat. His policies allegedly caused, or at least contributed to, the current financial crisis. He is attacked from the left for lax financial regulation, from the right for loose monetary policy, and from the middle for both. Yet two years ago, on leaving office, Greenspan [...]
2Mar2009 | David R Henderson and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel | 6 comments | ContinuedBootleggers, Baptists, and Bailed-Out Bankers
For more than a year now, people worldwide have experienced an extraordinary chain of economic events. Led by crushing increases in U.S. mortgage-related bankruptcies, the world financial collapse that followed has been termed the subprime crisis, the financial meltdown, the Wall Street bailout, the beginning of another Great Depression, and even the end of capitalism [...]
2Mar2009 | Bruce Yandle | 3 comments | ContinuedHow Rapidly Should the Money Supply Grow?
I would like to make one correction to Howard Baetjer’s article “Inflation 101” (September). The author suggests that inflation results when the money supply expands faster than the rate at which goods and services are produced. The author correctly points out that this expansion of the money supply will lead to rising prices. But inflation [...]
22Jan2009 | Mike Van Winkle | 0 comments | Continued-
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Book Reviews
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
